A mix of things

Went to Fall for the Book Festival in Fairfax, VA this weekend. John and I appeared on a panel with fellow writers Brenda Clough and Sue Lange (check out their stuff here: Book View Cafe.) The panel was great fun. Afterwards Brenda and her husband Larry fed us lamb. I love lamb. I’ve almost never eaten it. This was the first time I ever was able to eat as much as I wanted. I had to be rolled home because I had stuffed myself so completely I was entirely round.

Then, that night, I finally got to watch the Temple Grandin movie, which I had been waiting to see for months. It was really good! (For those of you who don’t know Temple Grandin, she may be the most famous autistic person in the world. Her unique way of seeing things allowed her to design a better, more humain way of moving cattle through slaughter houses that both helped the cattled and cut down on injuries and costs. Her system is used in over half the slaughter houses in North America nowadays. (Her thought was we keep cattle for our benefit, so yes they have to be slaughtered…but that does not mean that we should not show them some respect.)

I first became aware of Temple Grandin when I read parts of her book on training dogs in the bookstore. I was very impressed with it (even referred to it in a book I wrote.) She’s an amazing person, and the movie really did a wonderful job of making her sympathetic and understandable.

Ping-Ping watched the movie, too. She got it out from Red Box because she had heard me say I wanted to see it. She watched it on her own and came and told me, “When she was four, she did not know everything! She did not know everything!”

I thought this was adorable. It summed up Temple’s experience, but not the way we would have said it.